Catalan culture is as rich as it is complicated. It has produced more than its share of artists, architects, writers and composers. Catalonia is both mercantile and industrial, deeply rural (as much as anywhere can be, nowadays), deeply rooted in the past and enamoured of its own particular, forward-looking modernity. Its cultural and linguistic identity is distinct. It is much more itself than of the rest of Spain. This is more than folkloric fantasy or guidebook commonplace. Nor is it to plead a special case.

Many of Spain's autonomous regions – especially Galicia and the Basque regions, as well as Catalonia, have a similarly conflicted relationship with the idea of what it is to be Spanish. Everywhere is distinct, one way or another, and a sense of place remains important. In fact, it seems unavoidable.

Once, in a local restaurant in La Garrotxa, a volcanic region in the foothills of the Catalan Pyrenees, I ate a dish of oxtail cooked with cuttlefish. Black with ink, thick with the glutinous marrow of the oxtail, it had an unbelievable depth. Served as though it was nothing out of the ordinary, this version of mar i muntanya – a Catalonian surf 'n' turf – may have been a challenge, but was nowhere as extreme as the dishes the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià cooked at his restaurant, El Bulli.

Adrià insists his work is founded on a respect for culinary tradition as much as it is on innovation, however apparently weird and extreme the outcome. His food makes you think, as much as it gives you pleasure, which isn't a bad definition of what culture is. El Bulli (which is due to reopen as a "creativity centre" in 2014) stands on a clifftop road not far from the village of Cadaqués, near the border with France.

Adrià has been described as the Salvador Dalí of cooking, and Dalí himself spent much of his life in Cadaqués, and drew much of his imagery from his surroundings. Dalí's art, and that of Joan Miró, which had its origin in the fertile farmland near Reus, in southern Catalonia, was rooted as much in the local, in culture as well as place, as it was in the international surrealist movement. Similarly, Antoni Gaudí's architecture grew (and, however bizarre, has there ever been an architect more in love with organic form?) from observation and love of nature, as much as it did from modernisme, Catalonia's distinctive take on French art nouveau and German Jugendstil.

For Catalans, France is closer than Madrid, just as the Catalan language, often suppressed (especially under Franco) and subservient to Castilian since the 18th century, is as close to old French as it is to Spanish. Yet the Catalans are frequently as ambivalent towards France as they are resentful of Madrid's political authority. When, during the 19th and 20th centuries, artists from Catalonia travelled, as they did in increasing numbers, they headed for Rome, and then Paris and New York, rather than to Spain's capital. Picasso left Barcelona not just to escape, but to join an international avant-garde. No one thrives in isolation. But it is worth remembering that Picasso's invention of cubism was as much the product of periods spent working in Catalonia, in Cadaqués and the Delta del Ebro, as it was in the studios of Montmartre.

When numerous artists and other cultural figures left Catalonia during the oppressive decades of the Franco regime, especially during the 1960s and 70s, they did so in order to breathe as much to join a wider, international art community. Again, they looked to Paris, and then to New York. Barcelona may have always been the most outward-looking and cosmopolitan of cities in Spain since the 19th century, but it was still Barcelona, a city between the mountains and the sea. Its sense of itself, its urbanism and its collective spirit, can also be a trap. There's always the rest of the world to think about. A living culture has always depended on openness, reciprocity and exchange.

The almost shocking individuality – not to say perversity – of Gaudí's architecture, from the still incomplete Sagrada Família church to the seclusion and strangeness of Parc Güell, was only possible because of the forward-looking patronage of the Barcelona bourgeoisie, but it was also only possible because of a wider international culture. The best of Miró's later paintings was made possible because of what he reclaimed from the abstract expressionists who had, in their turn, been influenced by him. The work of Antoni Tàpies, or the extraordinary Joan Brossa, could never have existed, let alone developed, in isolation.

Much of Barcelona's cultural vitality and diversity over the past 30 years has been aided by private institutions, but this support has ebbed away in the economic crisis. While regional and national cultural centres throughout Spain and the rest of Europe are smitten with financial difficulties, Barcelona keeps its head above water, but only just.

Opportunities for artists to show, for authors to publish, are shrinking. At ground level, times are extremely tough. Who can afford studios? Unemployment is rampant. The domestic art market sluggish if not moribund. The rampant – not to say hysterical – consumerism and building booms of recent decades are over. The idea that economically tough times breed genuine artistic and cultural innovation is false. It just breeds less of everything, including fewer opportunities.

But culture adapts. The place of art changes. There is a complaint that cultural distinctiveness is not what it once was, but things never were that simple. And the Sagrada Família is still being built.

In Barça-loners, the Guardian in conjunction with the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia examine the quest for a separate Catalan state, the costs and benefits, the impact of the financial crisis and the origins and implications of this historical faultline running through northeastern Spain